from Hacker News

Printing and binding your own books and manuals (2003)

by clishem on 1/23/18, 3:27 PM with 31 comments

• by jimnotgym on 1/24/18, 12:30 AM

  >Originally I made myself one out of softwood, but I found that the wood bent too much and didn't give an even pressure over the spine when the nuts were tightened down

  Never made a bookpress, but have transferrable knowledge. You didn't need a rigid piece of wood, you need a piece with a slight curve so the middle touches first and the edges after. When the nuts are tightened it will go straight but be pushing hard in the middle. In case you don't have a bent piece of wood, you can plane or even sand the subtle curve (I would guess 3mm/ 1/8" would do for an A5 book). I am itching to try this.

  'Real' books seem to have some kind of linen scrim rather than tissue. I should imagine this helps with tensile strength like glass fibre tape does to GRP. Evo stick has a very pungent solvent smell, worth taking care of ventilation to avoid getting high

• by basicplus2 on 1/23/18, 11:31 PM

  Every person I know prefers reading manuals in paper book form.

  Unfortunately with the computer taking over and with price gouging on books has more or less forced the majority to "put up with" reading on screen.

  The system has failed us in not providing on the "promise" of localised (where you live) instant printing and delivery of cheap books from online.

  In my view we have essentially gone backwards because of the advancement of technology.

• by pkaye on 1/24/18, 12:04 AM

  I'm doing the reverse... scanning or buying books or manuals into pdf form.

  I realized I accumulated way too many books. They take up a lot of space, I don't read many of the often but would hate to lose the information. Thus I've slowly converted over the years. Also many pdf format books are cheaper than paper copy these days. I still keep the important books as paper copy but a bulk of the rest now fits is a harddrive available on my home network.

• by kqr on 1/24/18, 1:05 PM

  I have a huge fascination for technology that doesn't depend on forcing movement of electrons. I also think it's an important sustainability issue that we feel at least somewhat responsible to collectively, in our immediate social environments, don't forget how to do things "the old way".

  It doesn't have to start at global scale mutual destruction. A smaller community can go through a crisis and be left with little means. Does it make sense to suffer really primitive living conditions while waiting for someone to come and reinstate the tech we're used to?

  Isn't it better if, in addition to hoping for external help, we make an effort to avoid forgetting our legacy?

  In the unlikely event that it's needed, I can still take pen and paper notes at a hundred words per minute. I can still take and develop film photographs with expired chemistry. I'll still do fast multiplication with a slide rule. I'll cook food safely with a mercury thermometer and camping stove, I'll shave with a sharp blade and be in the next city before you know it on a bicycle.

  These are all things you can practise even if you live in a city and deal with computers a lot.

  Edit: Oops, accidental rant.

• by ggambetta on 1/24/18, 10:50 AM

  Amazing! This is pretty much the method I described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877533 last time we discussed amateur bookbinding, except I also did the slits across the spine and the dental floss. Other than that, even the homemade bookbinding press looks very similar :)

• by bluedino on 1/23/18, 11:56 PM

  Hah. Could have used this a long time ago. Used to print manuals after hours with a copier that punched holes, and used 3-ring binders. But that's annoying, having a binder full of docs. Comb binding wasn't much better. Saddle-stitching was okay, but you had to use 11x17 paper and didn't work for anything of reasonable length.

• by salgernon on 1/24/18, 6:24 AM

  I bought an Ibimatic punch at a barrage sale a few years ago - it punches a row of square holes in a page and allows binding using cheap plastic “combs”. The documents are never quite as satisfying as real binding - perhaps because I never took the time to resize the texts and the 8x11 format just isn’t well suited to books.

• by ryan-c on 1/24/18, 12:02 AM

  I've done this before with gorilla glue (which is easy to find) on the spine, works fairly well.

• by nitemice on 1/23/18, 11:31 PM

  Wow! This looks so cool. I really want to try this now, just for something trivial.

  I get the sense that it wouldn't work as well with less than hundreds of pages though...

• by gravypod on 1/24/18, 4:08 AM

  I wonder if you could render all of the man pages on your system to 8.5x11 and print them out like that

• by Ascetik on 1/23/18, 3:42 PM

  I remember stumbling across this site back in 2004. Amazed someone else found it.